PiCloud: Teaching students to recognize cloud technology

This Linux cluster is named PiCloud, and it uses LEGO as the "case". It was created by the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow in the United States as an educational tool to help students understand how cloud technologies like Amazon AWS operate.

PiCloud consists of 56 Raspberry Pi units housed in four cases made from LEGO bricks, connected via 16 Ethernet cables. Fourteen of these cables connect three Pi units to the network, while the remaining two connect to a hub. Each Pi runs Raspbian Linux as its operating system and operates three LXC virtual machines. The applications running on PiCloud include lighttpd, lookbusy, and Hadoop.